Do what you can to ensure SPC Ardmona's future, momentarily at least

Yes, each of us needs to do what we can to ensure the survival of Shepparton’s SPC Ardmona processing plant, for the moment at least.

One need not look too far or too deep to see and understand good reasons why the factory and the infrastructure it depends upon play a critical role in the economic wellbeing of this community.

Visit The News to add you weight to campaign.

Broaden you view and quickly it become obvious that the much lauded level-playing field is, and always has favoured the few.

Yes, we need SPC Ardmona to stay about for a while, but just long enough for us to learn about, and understand what it is we need to do to build a Goulburn Valley-wide community sufficiently resilient enough to withstand the unfolding society-wide shocks of the next few decades.

Rather than allow our communities to become implicated in the narrow financial definitions of globalization and instead of pursuing ever expanding growth, we should be working for “just enough growth”.

Success of a business should not be measured by a particular percentage growth each year, rather through its contribution to the community from which it draws its workers and to how many people it provides regular employment.

Success should not be measured through the raw brutality of the bottom line, rather whether or not that company is an integral player in the richness of the community in which it operates and within that how it embraces and cares about everyone from initial suppliers to the final customer.

Without stumbling into the rhetoric of the doomsayer, let’s us acknowledge that the future, even the immediate future, is going to be different from what has been, and is.

So what do we do? First, and of critical importance is to support this newspaper’s campaign to press our politicians to support short term goals of SPC Ardmona.

We need as much time as we can leverage to ready ourselves for an energy-depleted future as we surrender a lifestyle that is enlivened, almost totally by oil and coal.

Technophobes promise all sorts of wondrous energy solutions, but the few existing and scalable ideas, beyond simply using less, are solar and wind.

Support solar and wind ideas; support projects that encourage people to initially use less energy; live closer to where you work; cycle and walk where possible and look to your community to source whatever it is you need, including your food.

Join and support groups which are doing what they can to help us understand how we live fulfilling lives in an energy depleted future; read, read and read, and listen, listen and listen to learn about the societal instability that is arising from the exponential growth of recent decades.

For the record: our Federal MPs have received my SPC Ardmona plea.

Noisy 'hurrahs' and a chorus of criticism meets Budget

A "business as usual" Budget
 from Australia's treasurer,
 Wayne Swan.

Noisy hurrahs matched by a chorus of criticism greeted last week’s Federal Budget.

None were right, none were wrong, but missing was the long, long, long view; something that in the contemporary conversation is called “sustainability”.

Business as usual, seen from whatever political view you favour, is no longer appropriate and that, even allowing for a difference in opinions, is what our Treasurer, Wayne Swan, delivered.

That approach to, and acceptance of, the fact that we live in an unchanging world is problematic in the extreme.

The realities of last week’s Budget infiltrate our economy and the lives of most fundamentally change little, maybe we shift from one foot to the other, but change to a different lifestyle is foreign to all but a few.

The Swan Budget went to extremes to ensure we could live life as it is – more hurrahs and applause – but it overlooked the reality that our nation should be building and preparing for a distinctively different future.

Global warming is a gathering storm on the horizon and coupled with impending world food shortages, an imploding world economy, an exploding population, oil scarcity and climate difficulties, of which we have as yet only seen the leading edge, Mr Swan’s Budget should have responded to those unfolding dilemmas.

Rather that concerning himself with the much touted surplus, Mr Swan, supported by his Labor contemporaries, needed to demonstrate courage in delivering a budget that created a platform from which Australia could easily step to address those aforementioned difficulties.

The unfolding circumstances are hitherto unknown to the human project and with the ego-driven individuality of the past millennia being obviously not appropriate, the budgetary process should have addressed those excesses.

Rather than sketch out a scenario that allowed Australian’s to continue as being among the worst in the world on a per-capita basis at pumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, Mr Swan should have helped us understand numbers, and actions, that would have eased, if not stopped, that behaviour.

That, of course, would not have been easy as recent surveys have shown that Australians concern for their environment, and after all climate change is an environmental issue, has disappeared almost entirely from their list of worries.

With a deep breath, Mr Swan should have used his economic tools to shape a new look Australia: one whose strength lies in simplicity as opposed to complexity; the need to switch from growth and consumption to resilience and conservation; and an Australia that understood the dilemmas of our unfolding world and was prepared to bond to address those challenges.

Fine ideas, but waiting outside the door to mug us all is “reality” and there is our first challenge, untangling ourselves from that pseudo reality and addressing irrefutable truths.